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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#531

Post by milesrout »

logicchains wrote: post #66
lukev wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products. It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.

>If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. No it wouldn't. If someone opens up a new restaurant a block away there's not going to be much word of mouth when it just opened, and even if they make a website, web search will prioritise the websites of existing restaurants because their domains have been around longer and have more inbound links.

IDK what your community is like but if a new restaurant opened a block away from me then:

1. Every one would see it, because they have eyes and leave the house.

2. Every one would be talking about it.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#532

Post by johnnyanmac »

grues-dinner wrote: post #514
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed". And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of…

I'd rather cap salaries than company sizes. The logistics of certain industries may naturally require more manpower than others and put them at a disadvantage.

But someone earning $10m a year while their workers are on food stamps is unacceptable. Having a dynamic limit of total comp would mean they either take less money and put it into the company, or raise the wages of those employees.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#533

Post by johnnyanmac »

gigatree wrote: post #479
nofalsescotsman wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treating the symptoms is easier and cheaper. And let's be real, the money would rather treat symptoms than the cause. Convincing monied interests to stop advertising is not a realistic thing. This would have to be done through legislation and force. And I agree it should be done.

Neither convincing them nor compelling them through law would work. I’m surprised the author can’t see that as an ad person himself. The incentives are too strong; if you outlaw them, they’ll just be circumnavigated in more nefarious ways.

Law can be very strong but our "representatives" as of now aren't very good at representing the will of the people.

The system can work but we vote in horrible people to execute it.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#534

Post by noir_lord »

gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

That parallel between propaganda and advertising is why I have a pathological hatred of advertising, I block it in all forms possible, to the extent that if I can’t block it I won’t use the product.

I simply hate been manipulated.

So much so that I forget what the modern tech landscape is like for the average user til I use one of their devices.

We’ve (collectively we for techies) helped create a dystopia.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#535

Post by wk_end »

roenxi wrote: post #464
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs). Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge…

That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.

In theory, anyway, billboards are prevalent sans regulation because they’re (among) the most efficient forms of advertising. That is, if the advertisers would only be spending some money on astroturf campaigns and product placement instead of billboards, it must be because they’re less effective than billboards - otherwise they’d just put that money towards the astroturf campaigns and product placement in the first place.

So banning billboards makes advertising less efficient. In theory, anyway.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#537

Post by bdangubic »

rietta wrote: post #536

Impossible in the United States under the constitution. To put plainly, this would be a colossal first amendment violation, abridging the freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

what else seems “impossible” under the “constitution” and yet happens daily (if not hourly)…?

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#538

Post by Tempest1981 »

cyberax wrote: post #527
Aeolun wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the article mentions banning “sold advertising”, which seems like a fair way to go about it. You can still advertise your own stuff, but you cannot pay a marketplace to do it for you any more. Advertising would by necessity become a lot more local.

How would I advertise my app? Or my TV brand?

Reputable review sites are better than random advertisements

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#539

Post by Tempest1981 »

aldanor wrote: post #505
mystified5016 wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two kinds of advertising: your local mom and pop running a labor day sale in the local paper, and megacorps spending billions of dollars advertising soda and roblock lootcrates or whatever to kids, or plastering every square inch of public and private space with maximally attention-seeking posters and billboards. One of these is good and one is bad.

That's the tough part - drawing precise line. There's lots of points between megacorps and local mnps.

The line could be adjusted, and would need to be as people exploit loopholes.

If humans can't decide, we can train a LLM to be the arbiter.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#540

Post by permo-w »

kodt wrote: post #383
permo-w wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but we'd also lose (free) search engines. I doubt this. more likely we'd end up in a scenario where, as a way of capturing market share, large companies subsidise their search engine with other branches of their business, for example, hosting. also since we're speaking hypothetically about government interventions, there's no reason that a government couldn't set up a publicly owned search engine, in fact one may al…

>it's not advertising if it's on their own website Is SEO advertising though?

if you're not paying for it you're not advertising
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